"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)



   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,

   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are

   considering becoming one.

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                     July, 2001



In this issue: "The web wasn't even an idea when John Caples

worked, but all the elements are there - the headline, the copy,

the illustration, the artwork - only the medium, the speed, and

the scope have changed."





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Do you know who John Caples was? Probably not unless you're in

advertising. In a career spanning fifty years from 1925 to 1975,

John Caples was the most successful advertising copywriter who

ever lived. Today The Caples Award is given annually in his honor

to the best entry in creative advertising from thirty countries.



I've just read his book.



John Caples worked in the humblest sort of advertising, direct

response advertising. The sort of thing you see in magazines with

a coupon to clip and mail in with your check directly to the

seller of the correspondence course, weight-loss program, or what

have you. 



That's important to us for two reasons.



First, the web is the high-tech descendent of those magazine

ads. We are direct-response advertisers because the web is the

ultimate communication medium. It cuts out the middleman. We

don't have to put up a billboard hoping it will cause people to

go into stores to buy our products from somebody else. We can put

up forms right on our web pages that are the lineal descendents

of those coupons and sell directly.



We can take credit cards in real-time instead of checks by mail,

and we can reach the world for a fraction of the cost of those

magazine ads, but in every way our web pages are direct-response

advertising, or can be and should be.



Second, that sort of advertising suited John Caples perfectly

because he was a pragmatist. He believed in testing his ads,

variation by variation, to find out exactly what worked. And he

kept on testing for fifty years. 



In direct-response advertising you put a code number on the

coupon, or in the "extension" of an 800 number, and that tells

you which version of the ad brought the response. You can't do

that with other kinds of advertising because you don't know what

persuaded the customer to go into the supermarket and buy your

brand of toothpaste. You can only put up ads you think might work

and hope.



Yes, we could do that with web pages too. We could put a code

number in a hidden field of the response form and vary the

headline, the pitch, the color, everything, methodically, one at a

time, and see what worked best. I don't have enough time or

traffic to make that a reasonable thing to do.



Fortunately for me John Caples wrote it all down. His book is now

in its fifth edition, having been kept up to date by his

disciples. I stumbled over it by accident in Borders. It's a

humble-looking, non-descript sort of little book, but as I read

it I got more and more excited because as I looked at his ads I

saw web pages. The web wasn't even an idea when John Caples

worked, but all the elements are there - the headline, the copy,

the illustration, the artwork - only the medium, the speed, and

the scope have changed.



So here I was holding a book containing the results of fifty

years of experimental study on what works in writing web

pages........



I can't review for you here all he has to say; you'll have to

read the book. But let me mention a few points of interest.  



The headline. The headline is everything. Caples devotes four

chapters to headlines. I've always known the most important real

estate on a web page was the first visible screen, and that if

you didn't capture them there they weren't going to scroll

down. Caples supports that. Even if no scrolling is involved and

they can see the whole page at a glance, they won't read it if

the headline doesn't grab them. But then he goes on and tells me

what I didn't know - how to write headlines that work, based on

empirical data. There are five or so basic approaches, which he

rank orders, and pretty much with all of them a simple, direct

appeal works better than something clever.



The new headline on my newly-redesigned site is just this: 



"Sidereal Designs can grow your business with a professional web

presence."



The one thing all my potential clients have in common is that

they want to grow their business. So, in this headline I tell

them that the page is about a way to do exactly that, about what

that way is, and about who can provide it.



The text. Expand on the headline immediately. Be clear and

direct. Use facts and figures. Be witty if you can, be eloquent

if you can, but don't speak in generalities. Above all be

relevant to the customer's interest that was aroused by the

headline. 



He gives a marvelous example of bad ad copy by putting the words

from an actual ad into the mouth of a hypothetical salesman

approaching you in a store for the same product. After that

you'll never again write copy that sounds like that.



There is more, much more, but even if I had the space here I

don't presume to have mastered his material well enough to teach

it. What I have done is to draw some parallels from his work to

something I do know about which is web pages, and on that basis

to recommend that you read for yourself about something as

seemingly dusty and remote from the web as 1920's direct-response

ad copy.



The title is "Tested Advertising Methods." I've put up the

information on the book, and a link to its Amazon page, in the

book section of my web site at:

http://siderealdesigns.com/books.shtml



Best,



Ernie



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Sidereal Designs, Inc.               "Putting your business on the web"

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